On Easter Sunday in 2014, Christian Angermayer, the German investor, was on the beach on the Caribbean island of Canouan with three friends, contemplating whether he should take magic mushrooms.
Before he made his decision, he called a professor he knew who studies psychopharmacology. He explained to Angermayer that he was in the perfect set and setting, was of healthy mind, and he should try it.
So Angermayer, who says he feared he would end up freaking out and living as “a farmer in Argentina,” sprinkled some mushrooms in yogurt, ate it, and let the drugs take hold.
“I always say that I need to build a huge mushroom statue there,” says Angermayer, now 48 and worth $1.2 billion. “It was the most important positive experience of my life. When I came out [of the trip], although it took me years to get the thesis right, I had the first inclination that if it helped me this much as a happy healthy person, I can see the validation for how it can help people with mental health issues and beyond.”
Angermayer spent the next three years working on that thesis. On December 29, 2017, he took another trip, this time he came away with message from the divine: Go forward. There is no downside.
And the next day he flew to New York to meet the billionaire investor Mike Novogratz and told him about his interest in psychedelics and his two trips. In an only-in-psychedelics-coincidence, Novogratz’s sister called him the next day and told him how she just met a couple at a yoga retreat in Bali, George Goldsmith and Ekaterina Malievskaia, who were looking for funding for their fledgling psilocybin startup. Novogratz connected Angermayer with them and Compass Pathways was born to pursue psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, as an FDA-approved medicine.
That same year, Angermayer cofounded another company with Florian Brand, Lars Wilde, and Srinivas Rao called Atai, which was looking at DMT, the fast-acting, yet powerful hallucinogenic compound. (DMT is the active chemical in ayahuasca while 5-MeO-DMT is found in the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad.)
Last week, those trips came full circle: AtaiBeckley (as Angermayer’s pharma company is now known) was acquired by Eli Lilly—the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company famous for depression blockbuster Prozac and the weight-loss drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro—for $2.8 billion. As part of the deal, Eli Lilly could pay an additional $1 billion in milestone-related payments. Angermayer’s 15% stake in AtaiBeckely means he will receive around $360 million (pre-tax) from the deal. Eli Lilly will now own the experimental drug BPL-003, a fast-acting nasal spray containing mebufotenin benzoate (a form of 5-MeO-DMT) that is in Phase III development as a medicine for treatment-resistant depression. Phase III trials are expected to start in 2029.
“If I hadn’t had my trip on December 29 and not talked to Mike about it, I would not have had anything,” says Angermayer from his apartment in Lugano, Switzerland, gazing at the lake out the window. “It was the spark.”
AtaiBeckley is also developing another DMT-related drug as a dissolvable sublingual strip and has a pipeline of other psychedelic compounds including one related to MDMA, the active ingredient in “ecstasy.” But don’t expect Eli Lilly to go all Haight-Ashbury—the words “psychedelic” or “trip” are unlikely to be uttered by the company. In a press release, Eli Lilly called AtaiBeckley’s drugs “rapid-acting neuroplastogens.”
In other words, these are not recreational drugs. BPL-003 requires patients to attend a medical clinic where the nasal spray is administered, and the patient is monitored for two hours. It’s a similar treatment window to Johnson & Johnson’s ketamine-derived nasal spray Spravato, which was approved by the FDA in 2019, and has since become a $1.7 billion blockbuster drug. For years, biotech startups and researchers have been working to develop fast-acting psychedelic-based drugs with short treatment windows. Psilocybin typically lasts for about four to six hours while drugs like LSD last 12 hours. But a two-hour treatment window is much more cost effective.
In a statement posted on X after the deal was announced, Angermayer noted that the psychedelics industry is going through an era shift: “Psychedelics needed an evangelist ten years ago,” he wrote. “Now it is all about commercialization.”
The AtaiBeckley acquisition by Eli Lilly is the largest deal in the psychedelics space. It comes just under a year after AbbVie bought Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ lead candidate bretisilocin, an analogue of DMT, for $1.2 billion. Taken together, these deals signal that psychedelics have shed their hippie stigma and are now being taken seriously by Big Pharma as potential FDA-approved medicines. With the success of Spravato, Eli Lilly hopes to create a psychedelic blockbuster with BPL-003, says Karen Andersen, the director of healthcare research at Morningstar.
“We see this as a multibillion-dollar market quite easily, with Spravato alone surpassing $3 billion by 2030,” says Andersen, explaining that there are four million people in the U.S. with treatment-resistant depression. “AbbVie’s Gilgamesh acquisition and Lilly’s AtaiBeckley deal shows that there’s significant interest among Big Pharma firms in building on Spravato’s success—most of these are given less frequently than Spravato, but some are hoping to see better efficacy without lengthening monitoring times after administering treatment.”
Rick Doblin, the psychedelic research pioneer who founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986, says he was “astonished” by the AtaiBeckley news.
“It’s such an enormous amount of money,” Doblin tells Forbes. “It’s great for the investors, it’s great for the field.”
That said, he is “very worried” about Eli Lilly’s acquisition because he believes the treatment does not come with a robust therapy regimen. Doblin has dedicated much of his career to building psychedelic-assisted therapy: In 2014, he founded Lykos Therapeutics, a public-benefit corporation that tried to get its MDMA-assisted therapy protocol approved by the FDA unsuccessfully. (Doblin stepped down from the board and the company is now known as Resilient Pharmaceuticals and is backed by Miami billionaire Antonio Gracias.)
“It’s a mixed blessing,” Doblin says. “My main concern is that there’s an effort to move away from therapy.”
Angermayer invested $100 million of his own money in AtaiBeckley over the years, contributing to each financing round and buying up stock. (Atai merged with another psychedelic biotech in 2025, Beckley Psytech, founded by longtime researcher Amanda Feilding and her son, Cosmo Feilding Mellen.) The company hit the Nasdaq in 2021 at $15. Today, the price is down 63% and for people who bought during the IPO, the Lilly deal isn’t going to make them whole.
“If anybody really believed in Atai as I did,” Angermayer says, “then he’s making very good money.” But, he admits, “if you bought at $15, we’re not there yet.”
For a treatment based on ego-death, Angermayer does have a particularly big one.
“It’s never one person,” he says of this psychedelic revolution, “but I want to be seen as somebody who is one of the most important figures in this century to bring these drugs back into society in a very responsible way.”
While it is true that Angermayer is the most high-profile investor who has helped raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the psychedelic space, he is also standing on the shoulders of people like Albert Hofmann, the first to synthesize LSD, Timothy Leary, Doblin, Alexander Shulgin, Amanda Feilding, and researchers from of Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, New York University, Yale and others who started the psychedelic renaissance with studies showing the potential medical benefits of these drugs.
Now, after selling AtaiBeckley to Eli Lilly in the biggest deal in the psychedelics sector, his work with psychedelics is “done.”
Angermayer will have plenty of work to do with other companies in his portfolio. His fund Apeiron, which has $2.5 billion in assets under management, and holds positions in the Enhanced Games, the Olympics-like competition he cofounded that allows performance-enhancing drugs, and BlackRock Neurotech, which is developing a brain computer interface, and Cambrian Bio, a longevity company.
“I’m not bored,” Angermayer says. “I believe we’re entering the most amazing and challenging and the most disruptive time of humanity. There are so many breakthroughs in biotech, but also in other more deep-tech areas that are about to come. And that’s where our portfolio is. I think the next 10 years is going to be even better because it’s the right time now.”
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